Kamala Harris visits Mayor Cherelle Parker and Community College of Philadelphia students on National Voter Registration Day

Vice President Kamala Harris visited with a group of student leaders from a Philadelphia college on Tuesday during a brief campaign visit during which she reminisced about her first run for office: as a freshman class representative on the Liberal Arts Student Council at Howard University.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker burst out laughing and cheered at the memories.

“Mayor, it was a tough race,” Harris said during an event at the Community College of Philadelphia. “I ran against a girl from Jersey and she was tough, but I was from Oakland, so it was good.”

Harris, who was in town to speak with reporters from the National Association of Black Journalists at WHYY, stopped at the university’s Spring Garden campus to mark National Voter Registration Day.

The meeting was attended by students from the democratic clubs of the University of Pennsylvania, Temple, and CCP.

» READ MORE: Kamala Harris Says She’s ‘Working to Win’ Black Male Votes During Wide-Ranging NABJ Interview in Philadelphia

She received a thunderous applause from students in a room where homemade signs read, “Shirley ran so Kamala could win” — referring to former New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination — and “Vote like your life depended on it.”

Harris asked which schools were represented and received a barrage of overlapping answers, ending with a lone “UPenn.”

“Poor thing, are you the only one from Penn?” she asked amid laughter, then high-fived him.

Dajuan Wortham, a 20-year-old CCP student who spoke at the event, said he was shocked to see Harris in person and shake her hand.

“She was so happy… she was interested. That’s what I felt. She was really interested,” said Wortham, a CCP business student who is involved in the school’s Center for Male Engagement and committed to engaging other adolescent male voters in the election.

Wortham said he and the other speakers had intended to teach the group of about 60 students gathered in the CCP Pavilion how to register to vote. But once everyone had arrived and registered, they moved on to teaching them how to encourage their friends to get involved in civic affairs.

“My hope is that everybody will come out and speak up… so they can make a difference,” Wortham said. “Especially people my age, my peers, younger people… we are the future and we need to start shaping the future. We need someone to shape the future.”

The latest polls show Harris making up ground on adolescent voters that President Joe Biden appears to have lost, and she turned to adolescent adults in their essential home turf on Tuesday.

“You know how I feel about you and your generation,” Harris said.

“You all just smash it… what I love about you is that you’re brilliant, you’re caring, you’re impatient,” she said to laughter. “You’re saying I’m not going to wait for someone else to do this. I’m going to work on it.”

She encouraged students to work difficult to get people to register to vote before the Oct. 21 deadline in Pennsylvania, where both campaigns are in a key battleground.

“Remind them why it matters … because their voice is their power,” Harris said. “Their power is their voice. We’ll remind people: Never let anyone silence your power.”